Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula was published on this day in 1897. While vampires had long been part of the cultural matrix. and there were even novels in the nineteenth century before Stoker, it is Stoker who brought it into the culture’s livingroom, or possibly more accurately into the bedroom.
The unsigned Wikipedia article on vampires notes how Stoker’s “vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession, with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in Victorian Europe… (merging) with and dominated folkloric tradition, eventually evolving into the modern fictional vampire.”
And variations on the theme are continuous.
Last week Jan & I took auntie to see Dark Shadows, the latest in the many, many, many films, books, etc to deal with the ever popular blood suckers. (Rotten Tomatoes gives it a fifty-four percent positive rating. Jan gave it three out of five stars. And that’s pretty much where I stand, as well.)
There can be no doubt the undead are alive and kicking.
Why, precisely, I’m not so sure.
Social historians, sexologists and various others all have opinions on why…
Today vampires range from the camp versions like Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins to teen hearthrobs like the Twilight series star-crossed hero Edward Cullen, to Blood Ties’ cartoonist/detective Henry Fitzroy. Bad vampires and good, vampires for every taste…
Auntie has a taste for good vampires, who mostly eat out at blood banks, and apparently there is pretty close to an endless supply of this sub-set of the genre. Others, apparently, based on what you can purchase, like it nasty…
Me, I haven’t a clue as to why it never quite goes away.
But it certainly is interesting…
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